302 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE. 



By Mrs. II. M. PLUNKETT. 



" Who would not give a trifle \o prerent 

 What he would give a thousand wor]d.s to cure? " 



IN 1849 the Legislature of Massachusetts appropriated five 

 hundred dollars to be expended in a preliminary investigation 

 of the question whether any attempt at sanitation was worth 

 while ; and in the year ] 893 she expended $02,876.82, under the 

 supervision of her State Board of Health, much of which went to 

 accomplished biological and chemical experts, to learn exactly on 

 what a pure water supply depends. The previous work of the 

 board in this field had been so well done that Prof. Henry Rob- 

 inson, of England, in a paper read before the Congress of Hygiene 

 and Demography, in London, in 1891, said : " The action that has 

 been taken by the State Board of Health of Massachusetts, to 

 protect the purity of inland waters, deserves to be specially com- 

 mended as an example of broad and wise policy, in instituting the 

 systematic investigation by engineers, chemists, and biologists of 

 all that bears upon the purification of sewage and on the filtra- 

 tion of water. . . . The exhaustive reports under these different 

 heads may be stated to be far in advance of anything that has 

 been fairly attempted in this country." No better picture of the 

 difference in public opinion at the two dates could be found than 

 those two contrasting amounts of money. At the first, the apathy 

 and indifference born of ignorance reigned ; at the second, we be- 

 hold the immense amount of intelligent effort constantly being 

 put forth in this country as the fruit of a quarter of a century of 

 sanitary education. 



If a man is going to give a true history of an apple tree, it will 

 not do to begin when the tiny shoot pushes itself up through the 

 mold ; he needs to give an account of the seed itself, how pro- 

 duced, when planted, and of the influences that produced its ger- 

 mination. The seed from which the vast mass of public-health 

 legislation and action among English-speaking peoples has sprung, 

 was planted in England by Edwin Chadwick, between the years 

 1830 and 1844, when his epoch-making Report on the Health 

 of Towns was made to Parliament. Various commissions, with 

 him at their head, had investigated the great mortality among 

 the troops ; had looked into the condition of the children em- 

 ployed in factories, mines, and collieries ; had studied the terrible, 

 always-prevailing typhus ; but this tremendous array of facts, cul- 

 minating in the statement that the average length of human life 

 in agricultural Wiltshire was thirty-five years, and in Liverpool 



